Budget fallout – Child poverty was once at the heart of this government

By
Susan St John
-
45
1225

Without a shred of empathy or appreciation for what it means Budget 2020 says—

  • “[Child Poverty] Rates on measures of low income with a fixed threshold are expected to increase”.   And
  •  “On measures of material hardship, rates are expected to rise sharply, as previous New Zealand experience suggests that these rates are particularly sensitive to economic changes.

Does child poverty now not matter?  Why, since the problem was so clearly identified was it then ignored? And of course, these children live in families with adults who are also impoverished- so does that not matter either? 

Adults of working age, especially in tourism and hospitality, but widespread across the economy, will bear the brunt of the economic fall-out.  Children in low-income or benefit dependent families will be pushed even further into poverty that will stunt their life chances and damage the recovery and social cohesion for decades to come.

Yes, the budget had to protect jobs and employment as a priority, but many firms will not survive the enhanced wage subsidy period and nor should they if they are not well suited to the post covid world. We won’t need nearly as many cafes and restaurants without the same numbers of tourists for example.  With unemployment forecast to rise to around 10% it is inevitable that tens of thousands  more will need to access the run-down welfare system. While optimistic projections see unemployment quickly reversing in a V-shaped recovery, it is hard to share that optimism.

Benefit levels are far below the poverty line so that means-tested supplementary hardship payments will soar, but the newly unemployed will have to be really poor to qualify. All the special needs grants, the accommodation supplement and recoverable assistance are means-tested and further lock families into the poverty trap.  These expenditures are projected to grow 40% to $3.72 billion by 2024. Low income families in and out of benefits and casual work in the protracted recession will see their balance sheets rapidly eroded and many may never recover.

I see no evidence in this budget that the costs of COVID-19 will be shared fairly. Throwing a few million at foodbanks is a band aid that dangerously normalises private charity as the answer. The demands on budgeting services are already at breaking point. It will be a shocking winter.

Older people have had no reduction in their NZ super payments and will get the doubled winter energy payments whether they need it or not.  They have been protected health wise in this pandemic and while their investment income may drop, many will find themselves better off from two months of reduced spending. 

It is doubly tiresome that $10 billion will be allocated to the New Zealand Super fund over the next four years when Government couldn’t find even the $0.5 Billion necessary to fix the discrimination against poor children in Working for Families.  Why borrow more to put money into a treasure chest today for a far-off time when that money is needed so desperately today?  

TDB Recommends NewzEngine.com

The pre-budget announcement removed the need to satisfy the hours test for the In Work Tax Credit (IWTC) BUT it is only for “working” families who are not receiving a main benefit and have some level of employment income each week or the wage subsidy.  Thus, there will now be the ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’ unemployed: some whose children will retain the IWTC and some who won’t even though both have income support payments from the state.  This adds yet another layer of discrimination that offends child rights.  

Worse still, a penny-pinching mentality is displayed when the budget says the change to the In Work Tax Credit will cost “an additional $128 million over four years”.  It looks like they are trying to take credit for their ‘generosity’.  This is a false way to cost this policy as the ‘deserving’ unemployed should always have been allowed to keep their child payments regardless of losing hours of work. 

Astonishing for a government that cares about children it continues to penalise poor children in order to provide a neoliberal work incentive in a pandemic recession.  When the ‘deserving’ families lose their wage subsidy and have to go onto a benefit, the payment to the caregiver FOR THE CHILDREN falls by the IWTC amount of $72.50 a week. This penalty applies even if they end up with part-time hours of work. Thus Working for Families is hardly a secure cushion to protect children. Shame on Labour.

Budget 2020 should have corrected this policy and enabled all families on low incomes whether on benefits or not to have the full Working for Families package.  

 

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45 COMMENTS

  1. And the bottom line for all poverty and well-being in this country is rent. Rent. Rent. Rent. About which nothing meaningful is being done.

    • And nothing can be done as long as we import people and make housing so damned difficult to build.
      KiwiBuild was a monumental failure for so many reasons, including the fact that that the capacity to build that many houses was not available and that the Government fucked it up along with so many other things.
      Better off to cut the red tape that prevents affordable housing from being built and stop importing so many people. We clearly need SOME immigrants to fill areas of shortage, but the lack of a cook for a restaurant should NEVER EVER have been the trigger for approval of an immigrant, unless they held a Michelin star or two.

    • @Jays…? One can only imagine what Maori must have thought when non Maori started turning up back in the day?
      @ SSJ
      On the subject of money/child poverty… ?
      Read this.
      There’s this great cartoonist over at The Guardian AU.
      ‘First Dog On The Moon.’
      “This is why the billionaires have all of the money and you do not.”
      https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/may/18/this-is-why-the-billionaires-have-all-of-the-money-and-you-do-not
      jeff bezos sucks up $2489.00 U$ presumably… a second. Yes, you read me correct. two thousand four hundred and eighty nine United States Dollars A SECOND…!
      Of course, one could argue that if he earns that money fairly and squarely then good on him.
      But is it good on us and is it fair? Is it good for us? We, who can enjoy the glorious freedoms safety and security afforded us by our good luck, hard work and dead soldiers to be able to vote and are willing and eager to keep each other safe and secure only to have a mail order multi billionaire suck out so much money from a democratic system, the enduring good health of which is vital to all Americans…?
      Allowing the rise and rise of the likes of bezos is extremely dangerous. Perhaps the greatest danger of all because if he sees that his life and lifestyle appears to be threatened he’ll, in his mind, righteously respond, as will his kind. All 2153 of them, according to First Dog On The Moon.
      In the time it took me to write the above jeff bezos made approximately $1,592,960.00.
      ( 10:40:06 mins.)
      Where are our neoliberal scammers and traitors now who sold us the idea of ‘trickle-down’ while they were ‘privatising’ our stuff and things?
      Lets drag them into a public Royal Commission of Inquiry and ask them? ( My dream come true would be while under the shadow of the gallows.)
      Mad, abhorrent, mass murderers might pick off 20 or 30 or so until they’re caught but bezos, musk, theil etc are free to keep people in deepest poverty with its consequential poor health and premature death rates while they’re exploited for the pleasures and excesses of their billionaire masters.
      This is another eye watering picture graph depicting vast wealth gleaned from entrapping money.
      “This visualisation of the ultra-rich’s wealth blew my mind”
      https://boingboing.net/2020/04/29/this-visualization-of-the-ultr.html

      While this guy barely gets a mention.
      RNZ
      “Regenerative agriculture: How a dairy farmer learned to trust his instincts”
      https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/country/416143/regenerative-agriculture-how-a-dairy-farmer-learned-to-trust-his-instincts
      While we need therapy after the malls close for a few weeks during which time bezos makes multiples of billions our farmers must struggle against the tyranny of the ignorance they keep us trapped within.
      We relatively normal people are in far greater danger than we could ever comprehend at this point because we’re allowing the ignorance they sell us to be our guide.
      In AO/NZ the bezos-clone ethos is still deeply embedded in our politic. If I look as dispassionately as I can, I see no fundamental differences between today’s politicians and those of 1984. All I see is a significantly more sophisticated head-fuck tactic which blinds to those less fortunate including their indefensible homelessness, hunger and poor mental and physical health.
      There needs to be a paradigm shift in our thinking including making it abundantly clear that our politicians are there to do OUR bidding, not the other way around while they’re being lobbied by millionaires and billionaires.
      adern saying she has a team of 5 million? Fuck off. Just do your fucking job, that’s why we pay you, and those who pay the most tax are not our home grown millionaire and billionaire tax bludgers.

  2. And this is where I say I told you so.
    “Death Cult Capitalists” has been the name given to anyone such as myself that thinks the lockdown will cause more damage than it prevented and so now it begins.
    The damage was always going to fall most heavily on those who were already struggling and yet so many of the Turkeys that post here were screaming for an early Thanksgiving anyway.
    They screamed this like it was possible to tank our economy AND somehow lift people out of poverty simultaneously. It shows an infantile misunderstanding of the way the world ACTUALLY works.

    • @ Jay’s: almost all posters on here, as well as guest posts and not forgetting the blog owner are Marxist’s/Socialists, and by that 1 fact, of course they don’t know how the actual world works….there is NO prosperous Socialist country!
      Norway is mentioned (and they have about a trillion of spare funds due to that filthy oil reserves)

    • The damage you are referring to is damage to the perceived right to destroy the future via overconsumption of recourses and overgeneration of waste.

      The damage you are referring to is a reduction in the rate at which industrial societies convert sequestered carbon (under the ground or under the seas) into life-threatening carbon dioxide

      https://scripps.ucsd.edu/programs/keelingcurve/wp-content/plugins/sio-bluemoon/graphs/co2_800k.png

      which is causing super-fast overheating of the Earth and super-fast acidification of the oceans.

      Covid-19 has done what none of the mendacious governments (including of NZ) that attend ‘climate talks’ has even attempted to do: it has delayed the arrival of the stage over overheating and acidification at which the Earth becomes largely uninhabitable for humans. It is more than likely the organisms that make life possible for humans will be so depleted (or annihilated) by the overheating and acidification that even if humans were able to stand the physical conditions they will have nothing to eat.

      ‘Death Cult Capitalists” has been the name given to anyone such as myself’

      Since there is no capital as such (other than natural capital which is being converted into waste), and the entire system is now functioning money created out of thin air and credit created via fraud, you may like to note that the entire financial system is moving rapidly towards collapse.

      https://goldswitzerland.com/total-catastrophe-of-the-currency-system/

      As a ‘Death Cult Capitalist’ I am sure you will assiduously avoid looking at any of the evidence that clearly demonstrates that industrialised capitalism is very much the problem and not the answer, and will continue to beat the drum of business-as-usual that is actually the death knell for most of the vertebrate life and an awful lot of invertebrate life on this planet.

      ‘It shows an infantile misunderstanding of the way the world ACTUALLY works.’

      One thing is abundantly clear: you, jays, demonstrate an infantile misunderstanding of the way the world ACTUALLY works.

      I am prepared to debate every aspect here or elsewhere, which is something ‘Death Cult Capatilists’ never do (of course) because when it comes to the facts they haven’t got a leg to stand on.

      What ‘Death Cult Capitalists’ are so good at are:

      1. ignoring the facts

      2. keeping the public ‘debate’ well away from discussion of the facts

      3. using fiat money generated by looting and polluting the commons to promote their own short-term agendas.

      4. keeping the ‘proles’ uninformed or misinformed

      Since ‘Death Cult Capitalists’ are in control of the so-called public media, we can expect everything that matters to be made worse until the system collapses…which is not far off now.

      Whether the collapse will occur in 2020 or whether ‘the powers that be’ can manage to prop up the dysfunctional arrangements we endure for another year or two is yet to be seen.

      One thing is certain: we are not going to return to the gross aberrations that most people in ‘civilized nations’ still regard as normal because they have been trained to think that way.

      If we are both alive in 2022 and TDB is still online I will be able to say: ‘I told you so.’

      • “The damage you are referring to is damage to the perceived right to destroy the future via overconsumption of recourses and overgeneration of waste.”

        The damage I am referring to is the inability of our poorest (and some middle income) citizens to feed, clothe and house their families properly you dimwitted fool
        The rich and most middle income citizens will be just fine and won’t give a flying fuck about the rest as long as they are all good.

        But hey, don’t let the actual facts get in the way of your delusion.

        • ‘The damage I am referring to is the inability of our poorest (and some middle income) citizens to feed, clothe and house their families properly you dimwitted fool’

          Well, we saw how that worked out under the ‘Rock Star’ economy of John Key, during which the economy was ;humming along’ and the ability of the poorest and some middle income citizens to feed, clothe and house their families declined markedly.

          However, you have entirely missed my point -‘you dimwitted fool’- because perpetuation of pre-Covid-19 arrangements (i.e. no lockdown) would have simply exacerbated all the factors that lead to widespread poverty whilst taking NZ and the world to the point of economic implosion due to resource depletion somewhat faster and towards environmental meltdown a lot faster.

          You obviously did not look at or didn’t understand the linked items, so I will put it simply:

          Business-as-usual maintains population overshoot and rampant commercialism of the present times by sacrificing the welfare (and eventually the lives) of the children of the world.

    • So, Jays, under your wise and wondrous governance, where would the nearly 4 million tourists due from the previous year, have arrived from?

      • So it would seem that the ONLY damage that has precipitated from this lock down is the collapse of international tourism.
        The problem with the little world that you seem to inhabit is that the lock down will result in a multitude of small and large businesses collapsing, resulting in a spike of unemployment that will snowball.
        When the Government is predicting (best case scenario) 10% unemployment AFTER borrowing and printing tens of billions of dollars, that is a STRONG sign that this goes far beyond the tourism sector.

        Imagine if these idiots had NOT closed down the country and printed/borrowed all that money. We could have solved so many of our social issues such as homelessness, poverty and poor educational outcomes.
        Instead, our economy is fucked and our poorest with it.

        • ‘Imagine if these idiots had NOT closed down the country and printed/borrowed all that money. We could have solved so many of our social issues such as homelessness, poverty and poor educational outcomes.
          Instead, our economy is fucked and our poorest with it.’

          Mmm..I am just imagining what it would have been like if ‘these idiots had NOT closed down the country and printed/borrowed all that money’.

          1. A total shambles worse than has resulted in the US (at least there some governors did lock down despite the idiotic leadership of Trump).

          2. Hundreds of thousands of Covid-19 cases and thousands of deaths.

          3. Complete collapse of the bulk of the health system.

          4. A huge and still growing cohort of people carrying the infection, some symptomatic and some asymptomatic.

          5. Collapse in confidence and widespread fear, leading to people staying home.

          By the way, the economy was ‘fucked’ long before Covid-19 arrived on the scene: The [US] Fed panicked when the repo market started ‘misfiring’ in September 2019, and the panic has got a lot greater in recent months, with the Fed buying ‘everything’ in order to prop up the system. NZ, as a minor player embedded in the Fed’s global Ponzi scheme, will get taken down by the US when it goes under -later this year or in 2021. But the ‘fucked’ stage was reached long before the Fed’s latest round of lunacy; the problems that emerged in 2000-2001 and again in 2007-2008 were merely papered over via ;money-printing, and when the system finally blows up it will be the biggest collapse in history.

  3. “They are us ” obviously did not apply to the benefituries or their children.
    The budget gave money to the food banks so the humiliated poor could line up for a handout rather than an increase so they had a hand up .
    I read many comments about how tough National were on benefituries and in some cases I agree but the same writers are very quite at the moment .

    • Are you accusing me or anyone else of taking it easy on Labour? I can assure you that if any of our own was to fail that I would be extra hard on them.

    • If they had actually given a flying monkeys, they would have enacted a far less onerous response to corona virus and spent the money supporting the poorer among us.
      Instead we have a tanked economy AND not enough resources to help those people most affected by all this.

      • Some of this talk about the different types of corona responses is actually a topic about a loss of meaning, Yknow this whole thing has no meaning for you so what are you doing here? And well you’re searching for something in The Labour Party that might be interpreted as a way of making you happy and I’m sorry to disappoint you but you’re searching for happiness in all the wrong places.

        Everyone seems to have arrived at the conclusion that there’s a crises and 2 things are happening here 1) is the huge injury to your psychological health and 2) you just don’t have any other way of making sense of things. So I or anyone else here can not count on you being a communist or a liberal or a capitalist or what ever. If you want to talk to everyone then you have to reduce the issue to the lowest common denominator and those are how people are feeling.

        I don’t know what your politics is or how much you earn but I do know you have a brain so I’ll talk to you in that language.

        The second thing is once you create these subtle invitations it allows you to perceive in yourself in a particular way. So if you attach labels to yourself like poor and down trodden and so on and so on then gradually you will actually feel worse.

        So you are in fact more fragile than you have ever been and this is something mental health professionals have to tackle head on because it is something that is very specific to kiwi culture because not everyone reacts to The Labour Party in the same way that you do and nor does the vast majority of humanity react to the Labour of New Zealand the same way through out all of history.

    • I do remember asking the same sort of thing when National and Key ran the slogan, “A Better Future”.
      The question I asked was “for who”?

  4. Just had the Leader of the Oppositions office on the phone asking me to take part in a survey of my concerns. I was quite happy to give my 2 cents but I was required to give my name and address before the survey so I gave it a miss. Didn’t want unsolicited contact to follow or be part of a data base. Was I wrong?

    • @ sixfootfour – exactly – same with the Green Party they require your first born before you can give them your opinion.

      Considering political parties seem to have IT security breaches and are prone to hacking, neither Labour or Greens seem to consider the privacy of smarter people who don’t give details out to organisations when you don’t know how they will be used or who will get to see them and a target for hackers.

  5. Elephant in the woke room, many of the cafe/tourist/supermarket low income jobs were ‘ghost’ jobs before Covid. The wage subsidy is just keeping many industries going that are going to fail anyway and were never viable in the first place but for residency points, and the scams were already making NZ go broke and putting others out of business. Government money should be to help NZ citizens and children get out of poverty and the non NZ citizens wanting NZ benefits should be turning to their own countries for help.

    NZ has become full of ponzi’s by importing in workers with practically zero prospects in NZ due to zero English or real skills which funny enough makes them hard to employ for a decent employer not an exploiter who wants that, and allowing foreign students to stay in NZ for years post ‘diploma’ led by all the pro migrant lobby groups. The migrants were then allowed to bring their spouse, aged parents and kids over while also having kids in NZ on the back of a flakey diploma or degree and being unemployed or a low wage job like a “manager” of a retail or supermarket position …. now crying all over the media, and demanding though massive lobby groups, NZ keep supporting them, as the wheels start flying off the ponzi. Actually it’s not the migrants themselves complaining in most cases, it’s actually the parasitic immigration industry than is making money out of the NZ visa scams, and don’t want the millions they are making, to disappear.

    Many of the employers have multiple businesses employing multiple migrants and now crying for help. Well you have to wonder why people have so many different companies with low wage workers rather than concentrating on just one business idea and getting it profitable.

    Wake up. NZ is too small to keep supporting the ponzi ghost jobs, sunset industries and the world’s poverty employees forever. Increasingly the NZ kids are the ones suffering the most and all the resources are being siphoned off by other people’s nationals for other people’s nationals who tend not to be poor at all. The amount of diversity grants and roles alone, is astonishing. Melissa Lee types, eat your heart out.

    We now have different migrant groups fighting over premium roles, aka the human rights commission https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/114142328/race-relations-commissioner-announced-as-meng-foon, while once in, seems to have a clear agenda, aka out of 250 complaints during covid, approx 24 were Asian race related which is all the media focused on, (so what about the other 226 complains, most of them not race related (age, gender etc, who knows, because they are only cherry picking their own special interests) and no special hot line for the other 226 human rights complaints or any information about them. https://www.tvnz.co.nz/one-news/new-zealand/pandemic-triggers-spike-in-racism-nz-unnecessary-blame-game-human-rights-commission

    The best thing for NZ to do is get everyone who is on a temp visa permit to go home which is completely legal and within their rights if a person’s circumstances change. NZ can not keep adding more benefits for more low skilled, low paid, criminally minded, or income less migrants each year, on top of the massive amount of local poverty than has been increasing due to the astonishingly low wages offered in NZ. We don’t even have enough water in Auckland anymore, let alone the social housing which we have been waiting for 11 years for.

    You are better off on a benefit than working these days. Beneficiaries I know are enjoying the double winter payment grant of an extra $100p/w, the accomodation benefit which mostly pays the rent, and have a lot less expenses than if they work. I’m not suggesting it is easy to be on a benefit, but am suggesting that standards have dropped below benefits for many working poor with income stability due to the shear amounts of low paid, part time, contact and gig jobs that increasingly NZ work force has become.

    Entire industries are being blown into poverty rates aka Chorus workers when over 90% of them were paid below the minimum wage when the labour inspectorate called. Once upon a time it used to be a solid blue collar job in NZ. Likewise the bus drivers which is apparently now a job of last resort. They can’t get locals because the wages work out less than benefits with all the mucking around.

    • Save NZ. Why no one here pings you for your posts has got me fucked. Your racist one eyed view of NZ society is mind boggling. Every thing to you is black and white. The immigrants are being exploited with low wages. The sunset industries are described so because you don’t or won’t work in them because you see an environmental improvement without them. It wouldn’t matter what you paid the majority of the unemployed, they would not do the manual work required to be employed in those “ sunset industries”. I’ve read your posts and the same theme comes to the surface in most cases. Others hear might let it slip but I can’t let your vitriolic bullshit slip past without comment. In my opinion. This country was built on immigrant labour whether it be Chinese Italian, slavic Dalmatian or pacific. You need to get your head around the fact that a lot of unemployed are not capable or want to work in the areas that labour is needed. Construction and farming to name two. I don’t know what you contribute to this country is but it must be substantial for you to look down and judge others as you do.

      • New view – I’ts interesting how woke/right wingers who disagree, love to shoot the messenger, because they actually had nothing concrete to back up their point of view so then fall back on personal vitriol.

        I am tired of the discourse that we need migrant labour in NZ because “a lot of unemployed are not capable or want to work in the areas that labour is needed.”

        Local workers don’t want or need to be exploited which is why exploiters can’t find workers (and off the back of that a parasitic immigration people trafficking industry has formed).

        Chorus subcontractors (where 90+% of the workers are paid below minimum wages which is illegal as found by a labour inspectorate), are majority migrants now rolling out the broadband slap dashedly, and the people employing them are migrants and the people employing them are mostly offshore companies and the person who set the whole scheme into action are CEO’s of Chorus and the like, bought in from overseas with zero interest or understanding of NZ communities. These days the CEO is incentivised to make shareholder and personal profits and screw over everybody and everything else, which is why planet is in dire straights with climate change that 100 companies contributed the majority to but still operating. https://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/2017/jul/10/100-fossil-fuel-companies-investors-responsible-71-global-emissions-cdp-study-climate-change

        Now locals are scapegoated for not wanting to work under illegal conditions by echo chambers like New view!

        Jobseeker was up 11% before Covid, and now the ghost jobs are being propped up by the future workers of NZ.

        Funny the the opposite is often true and people are very keen to work, they just don’t get the job when there is so much competition!

        5,000 queue for supermarket jobs in NZ
        https://www.abc.net.au/news/2010-01-22/5000-queue-for-supermarket-jobs-in-nz/1219128

        New View, any idea why with NZ’s mass immigration machine, on the backs of chefs and supermarket workers and labourers, can’t build any affordable houses (trying for 11 years now) and the roads and apartments keep needing remedial work or never get completed and are now some of the most expensive in the world?

        New View, any ideas where the ingredients to make Meth come from and how they are flooding into NZ?

        New View, any idea why tobacco and Liquor were deemed essential services during Lockdown with Covid?

        New View, any ideas if our new Human Rights commissioner is ever going to speak out against human rights abuses in China?

        • You’re covering so much ground I’m not going to follow you around. You’re angry fair enough. Leave the immigrants alone. You picked on Chorus,Yes they got caught but there’s plenty of employer’s out there that are happy to exploit kiwi labour. There are plenty Of immigrants working happily on dairy farms on orchards in construction and forestry working for more than the minimum wage. They are jobs A lot of kiwis won’t do regardless of what you say. As for supermarket labour. Plenty of kiwis there.

          • New view, I’m not angry at the immigrants, I’m angry at the parasitic immigration people trafficking industry operating in NZ which is supported by our bovine, crazy government bums on seats immigration policy without too much care or attention to who resides in NZ and gets citizenship (those handy with paperwork with not much morals based on the growing criminal classes residents growing here) while pretending their laziness is actually a kind face.

            Even the pro migrant people posting on this site, (Once-were-Tim) think the government is doing a terrible job with their immigration policy.

            The unions like unite are now advocating we just give all the migrants coming to NZ the unemployment benefit so they don’t even have to work anymore. If they work for cash and have an accident then ACC pays them out…. Well that will work for NZ, more people on benefits and those working paying no taxes??? On top of that for 15+ years the policy is to bring the aged migrant parents too, who can get on the pension, free health and retirement care, without ever having to pay tax in NZ… No wonder NZ is attracting 10% of all migrants who can get residency here with no income at all and start being supported by Kiwis ASAP and Asian pensioners are expected to triple (their numbers have surpassed both Maori and Pacific Island pensioners combined)!

            For every migrant who should not be here as they have nothing to contribute and need welfare top ups instead, there is a missing house, job, increase strain on health care, justice, water, social welfare, and our roads…

            That would not be so bad if NZ had plenty of the above, but we don’t. So someone more vulnerable without an extensive migrant workers and union lobby machine behind them, are the ones missing out.

            Now we have the visa ponzi growing 18% year on year with more and more uneducated, semi skilled, people coming to NZ who have no idea that the lies they are told by the parasitic immigration authority are untrue and then essentially being dumped into NZ with fake paperwork and few prospects… Not a few – hundreds of thousands of them per year who refuse to leave.

            Yet to see widespread prosecution and deportation of those profiting from the Ponzi scheme by bringing in migrant workers…

            There needs to be a migrant limit and choose the best folks to come to NZ from that limit and then be mindful that overseas people can come BACK to NZ at any time, including the 1 million native NZer’s overseas, and they might come back all at once and overwhelm the NZ welfare system on top of all the migrants, migrants children and so forth … starting to happen with Covid, expatriates are returning with their families and kids… but wait they are joined by people who got a passport as a baby but never lived here coming back too https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/121302846/colour-drained-from-real-estate-agents-face-as-he-realised-hed-been-defrauded-of-120k-in-sim-hijacking-scam…

            There is zero forward planning and risk control in the NZ government and hasn’t been for 15 years…

  6. Its interesting that nobody picked up on the PM short changing taxpayers with her 20% pay cut or am I the only one?

    She has 3 other roles that are all paid, and in excess of $280,000 each.
    Min of Culture & Heritage
    Min of Poor & Hungry Kids
    and Chair of the PMDC

    For someone who’s meant to care, it looks like she cares more about money and her own ‘Well Being’ ay?

  7. Here is one problem that is never mentioned in the discussion re welfare.

    Questions to be asked while unemployed re funding of medicines and healthcare add them here to add them to a possible survey.

    This is why I say only targeting medicines funding is only HALF OF THE MEDICINES FUNDING PROBLEM.
    This is why I say we need a MULTI TARGETED APPROACH.

    I would not be surprised one bit if half the unemployed are people in a relationship WHO CANNOT GET A BENEFIT of any sort including the supported living payment.

    Due to the restrictions in place which allows you to have or not have the slp or Jobseekers.

    How many of them are unable to buy all their meds every week or even the doctor or xray or whatever that had to be paid for that you would get paid for if you were under ACC care or benefit because of not enough money.

    This discrimination due to relationship status has to be brought to an end.

    In my opinion it is a breach of Article 25 of the Un Human Rights Act .

    Denial of healthcare and welfare due to economic status.

    We hear of chemists saying all the time of people not being able to afford even funded meds let alone unfunded meds.

    Then we have the waiting lists to get into the hospitals etc.

    I my opinion we need to start the discussion to turn ACC into a full blown MEDICARE AGENCY that covers ALL LONG TERM ILLNESSES no matter how they are occured.

    I suggest we get a survey done and measure the following.

    1 what % of the population is in a relationship with a long term illness .

    2 what % of the population that is in a relationship is having trouble funding funded meds ( Not all towns have a countdown or Bargain Chemist with free prescriptions).

    3 what % of the population that is in a relationship is having trouble funding unfunded meds.

    4 what % of the population that is in a relationship has applied for a Pharmac statutory authority and been refused funding.

    5 of that % of the population that have applied for a statutory application How many applications in total has their doctor applied for and been refused.

    6 How many people with long term illnesses have been refused the supported living payment benefit.

    7 How many people with long term illnesses have been refused the Jobseekers benefit.

    8 How many people with a long term illness that’s not recognised as a “long term illness” have been refused an SLP or Jobseekers benefit.

    Lets face it all winz benefits for anyone with a long term illness are inadequate anyway.

    They are nowhere near enough to pay for your medicines as they only pay a %.

    The disability allowance was originally intend only to pay for travel to your doctors and doctors fee’s it was never intended to pay for Medicines.

    Even if you make a statutory application to Pharmac to get a med funded there is absolutely no guarantee you will be funded no matter how many applications your Doctor or specialist makes.

    So what does everyone think.

    LETS CHANGE THE NARRATIVE !!!!!!!

    Any other questions you can think of we should ask ?

    THIS IS ANOTHER PRONG TO BE USED IN THE TOTAL ABANDONMENT OF THE RELATIONSHIPS RULE and to get long term illnesses and medicines funded and POVERTY ERADICATED.

    IT IS TIME TO STOP BEING NICE.

  8. I have enormous respect for the work you do Susan St John. I wish our government would take notice of what you say. Personally, I come under the aged who have spent less under lockdown although I shop frugally in normal times. I saved hard for retirement, but most of that went on needy children eg the ChCh earthquake took its toll on one son and his family. I was worried about electricity prices once I retired and appreciate the government support for this. However, my circumstances are comfortable compared with those in poverty, long term or newly relegated. I donated to the Sally Army charity started to alleviate the poor. This is really an insult to the poor when they need their share of the economy so they can live in dignity meeting their needs. I told myself that the charity was an embarassement to the government. More likely it gets the government off the hook to set up the necessities for a decent society. We need to direct our energies into overturning this system that looks to a parliamentary solution.We should set up a socialist society where people take control over the economy, over the elites/capitalists who put their own interests first.

    • Janio I applaud your actions. The criticism of the WEP is not that it is given to low income superannuitants who will benefit from it but that the rich get it also and wont even notice they have it— its is not even taxable. If it was an opt in- anyone who wanted it could have it but about $400m would be saved.

  9. I suggest the government policy should be called mean-tested to express correctly what is going on with welfare, an outdated word in the shrivelled minds of the mummies who have arisen from the depths dating back to Big Depression days and walk like zombies whose touch causes ‘welfare clients’ to cry. Not welfare – but farewell in the ‘you’re out of the system buddy’ meaning.

  10. If there was a Left politician to the left of Labour who could talk, how they could destroy Labour over this. Leaving only the neediest without help in an economic crisis, from the party for the neediest?! Sheezus.

    Labour was the party of the people and persuasion. The last follows from the people?! But they know better from their professional advisors, or, the Labour Party. No one else there these days. All pricks in who liked ’84.

    I realise cynicism has always been a feature, but you also once had a heart, pricks for the rich now. YOU WERE WRONG. But enjoy the money, on your way to Hell.

    Persuade a little. For the least of us, the heart of us. Hope there are not too many broadleafs in your lawns.

  11. My acid touches to the heart of the present ’84 regime don’t matter when you , Susan, don’t get much reading, even comparative to other Left essays. Whilst Kiwiblog gets 400 comments from taxi-drivers and out of touch oldsters like my late father. Just as Labour reaches the perfect intersection of moral and pragmatic bankruptcy. After all those years of ‘pious’ pursuance of the latter.

    Our lack of interest in our heart, let alone Labour’s, even on the Left, is a deathnail.

  13. I’ve got a newsflash for you Susan: “Child Poverty” was never really at the heart of this government. It was just a slogan to get elected.

    And hey, I suppose it worked. But once elected it can be discarded like ‘eliminating homelessness’ and ‘carbon zero’ and all the other BS lines they spin.

    • Knowing me from my less admirable actions, Ardern, unless she’s Sauron, tries to only lightly engage with the morality of what she thinks is necessary, whether for a greater (as she probly believes ) or lesser (me) cause (itsa all about parking prangs in my case, ya nosey bugs!). But her big sale of doing for the neediest while knowing it’s really all about her redneck focus group findings hating the same is vile as it’s defined. Thanks to thisahere reasoning I now hate her.

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